Rep. Steve Scalise is thriving as chief GOP recruiter
by Jonathan Tilove - Times-Picayune (excerpt)

Washington -- This is the summer of Steve Scalise's contentment. At the end of June, he got a run-scoring hit in his first at-bat off the previously unhittable Cedric Richmond at the Congressional Baseball Game. A week later, President Barack Obama signed a transportation bill including Restore Act language directing BP oil spill fine money to Louisiana and other Gulf states that had the Jefferson Republican's fingerprints all over it. He holds a seat in Congress that he can keep for as long as he and the Republic are humming along. And he is traveling the country -- Illinois and Missouri this weekend, and California a few weeks back -- as chief recruiter for the National Republican Congressional Committee, emerging as Nancy Pelosi's nemesis. When the political history of 2012 is written, Scalise may emerge as the man, as much as anyone, who kept the California Democrat from regaining the House speakership.